1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a cleaning device for printers and, more particularly, to a cleaning device suited for an ink-jet print head of an ink-jet printer.
2. Description of Related Art
Conventional ink-jet printers are prone to have ink become built up on the surface of the ink-jet print head during printing operations. Thus, the build up causes the surface of the ink-jet print head to become tainted, resulting in improper printing whereby documents may be scrapped, thereby causing waste in time, money and effort. Thus, it is necessary to frequently perform cleaning operations so as to remove the residual ink from the ink-jet print head to avoid the clogging of the ink-jet print head and impaired printing operations. In this connection, a cleaning device set is required for the ink-jet print head to perform the cleaning operations. The cleaning device has a wiper for removing ink, foreign matter etc from the ink-jet print head. However, an additional power source for driving the cleaning device is required for the conventional printers when the cleaning device performs the cleaning operations for the ink-jet print head. In general, a motor is added so that the power of the motor is used to drive the wiper of the device for cleaning the ink-jet print head. As such, the size and the weight of the ink-jet printer increase. It is therefore very difficult to reduce the size of the conventional ink-jet printers. Also, the addition of the motor increases the manufacturing costs of the ink-jet printers. In this light, the conventional ink-jet printers cannot overcome those disadvantages of additional power source, complex mechanism and larger occupied space, and thus, need to be improved.
Therefore, it is desirable to provide an improved cleaning device for ink-jet printers to mitigate and/or obviate the aforementioned problems.